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Christmas is coming up and hopefully you all will have some time to sit down, relax, review the past year and make some plans for 2012.

I know that “living without goals” seems to be state of the art nowadays, but if you are living an a goal-oriented business environment – like I am – where you cannot wake up and just do what you are passionate about, a system to manage yourself will be essential for your success. This is why I recommend to structure your ideas and to make some plans for 2012, now.

This year, I had the chance to do my review already before Christmas which gives me the opportunity to provide you with a step by step guide which I created while doing my planning for 2012. Read more…

Last week, I had a discussion with two colleagues about the cooperation difficulties with other colleagues that do not perform in accordance with minimum standards of professional behavior. I often experience that some colleagues – always the same – need weeks to answer mails or simply are not able to complete tasks. Often their desks are completely overwhelmed by printouts and notes and the office looks chaotic. – Do you know this type of colleagues? 😉

I believe, that beside personal traits everybody is able to work in accordance with minimum professional performance standards. To support this theory, I created a “one pager” with five suggestions for professional performance:

This week, my wife and I took two days off and we went for an extended weekend trip to a beautiful recreation area. But for today, I expected to get lost in a load of emails that flooded my company inbox during the last two days. Thus, I decided to quick start this morning by “speed processing” my inbox to get an overview as fast as possible. – This is how I achieved it:

1. I got up early to be one of the first people in the company to minimize interruptions by colleagues.

2. By screening my inbox for outdated and deletable emails, I could easily delete all newsflashes that came in during the days and I quickly checked for updated appointments or requests that were already answered by colleagues. This reduced my inbox by nearly 30 percent.

Set “Display Preferences” to “Entire page scrolls”, “Grid (One line with columns)” and activate “Show note and file attachment icons on the left”.

Activate the following “Fields/Functions Used”:
Folder, Start Date, Due Date, Repeat, Length, Timer, Priority, Tag, Status, Star.
To learn more about how I use these fields, please see “Task Management with Toodledo.com”.

Set “Row Style” to “Title is styled by priority” and “Completed tasks are dimmed”.